Month: April 2016

Dr Geoff Belknap has written a guest post for The Guardian‘s science blog, The H Word. The blog argues that citizen science/humanities methods have the potential to change how we see expertise, and how non-professional historians can become key partners in investigating big-data history. The article is available here

Enter the Museum for a unique evening of performance and drama. Drawing from a rich variety of medical plays and historical material, the event will illuminate, provoke, and dramatize developments which have shaped ideas of the body from the 18th century to the present day.

Join academics from across the University of Oxford, professional actors from the Pegasus Theatre and staff of the Museum of the History of Science as they show how these developments have been mapped not just by medical writing but by theatre, which has a long history of engaging with science and medicine.

Scenes and readings will include:

Shelagh Stephenson, An Experiment with an Air-pump (1998)

George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906)

Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts (1881)

A selection from the WWI poetry collection at Oxford by Sassoon and Owen

The Constructing Scientific Communities project and the Hunterian Museum have co-curated an exhibition on the history of vaccination, which is now open.

Vaccination: Medicine and the Masses will run in the Qvist Gallery at the Hunterian Museum until Saturday 17 September. Admission is free. Further information on the exhibition and the opening hours are available on the Museum’s website

Other events connected to the exhibition are taking place in May and full details are available on our Events page.

The Politics of Participation: Early Nineteenth Century Scientific Citizens

The construction of British scientific communities in the early nineteenth century, especially in natural history, was a confessedly more inclusive process than that involved in sustaining the Republic of Letters in the previous century. This inclusiveness, however, did not involve a loosening of the constraints that governed participation, but more regulation of the means by which participation occurred. Scientific reformers in the 1830s proposed various models for organising wider groups of participants to ensure the most efficient collection and use of scientific information. The development of standardised procedures and increased vigilance, however, allowed cooperation without the necessity of consensus, and working-class participation in science often confounds expectations that shared practices imply shared aims. By looking at periodicals and other evidence of occasions of practice, Dr Secord will suggest that working-class participants held different views of knowledge and community which implicitly challenged the idealised division of labour proposed by scientific reformers

Sydney Padua is an animator and graphic artist, whose graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage won the British Society for the History of Mathematics Neumann Prize, the British Book Design Award and was a finalist in Goodreads Best Graphic Novel. Unusually for a graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures is heavily footnoted, and combines detailed research with the creation of an alternative reality in which Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage join forces to complete the world’s first computer, the Difference Engine, whilst embarking on a series of wonderfully illustrated adventures which involve major cultural figures from the Victorian period. In this talk, Sydney Padua reflects on Lovelace and Babbage’s achievements, her own creative interpretations, and visions of his Analytical Engine.

According to a famous formula going back to Immanuel Kant, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the transition from natural history to the history of nature. This paper will analyze changes in the institutions, social relations, and media of natural history that underwrote this epochal change. Focussing on the many posthumous re-editions, translations, and adaptations of Carl Linnaeus’s taxonomic works that began to appear throughout Europe after publication of the tenth edition of his Systema naturae (1758), Dr Müller-Wille will argue that the practices of Linnaean nomenclature and classification organized and enhanced the flows of data—a term already used by naturalists of the period—among a wide range of amateur and professional naturalists and associated institutions in new ways. Species became units that could be “inserted” into collections and publications, re-shuffled and exchanged, kept track of in lists and catalogues, and counted and distributed in ever new ways. On two fronts—biogeography and the search for the “natural system”—this brought to the fore entirely new, quantitative relationships among organisms of diverse kind. By letting nature speak through “artificial“ means and media of early systematics, Dr Müller-Wille argues, new powerful visions of an unruly nature emerged that became the object of early evolutionary theories. Classical natural history as an “information science” held the same potential for generating surprising insights, that is, as the experimentally generated data of today’s data-intensive sciences.

Upcoming Events

John Ruskin, Science and the Environment8 February, 2019 at 9:00 am – 5:00 pmOxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PW, UKThe Victorian art teacher and social reformer John Ruskin died in 1900, but his ideas remain deeply relevant today. In honour of his 200th birthday, the museum is hosting a symposium where experts on Ruskin, Victorian culture and the environment will discuss his views on science and natural history, and on the impact of industrialisation…

Ruskin's Trees8 February, 2019 at 6:00 pm – 7:30 pmOxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Rd, Oxford OX1 3PW, UKPublic Lecture with Dr. Fiona Stafford The lecture explores Ruskin's lifelong love of trees, from the idyllic garden at his family home in Herne Hill to his Lake District estate at Brantwood. Ruskin looked at trees with an eye trained by painting, a mind coloured by literature, a heart lifted by a sense of the…